Colorado Sustainability 2009 Conference

It is clear that we need to do a better job tracking greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as a result of building projects. It is also clear that designers need to be empowered to reduce those emissions. To this end, this presentation will introduce participants to RMI’s Green Footstep, Athena Institute’s EcoCalculator, and the Carnegie Mellon University Green Design Institute’s EIO LCA tool as a suite of tools available free of charge that can be used together to get your building on the path to carbon neutrality. Green Footstep provides a whole-systems and life cycle portrait of the GHG emissions associated with a new building construction project, and helps you identify design targets to meet a particular emissions goal. The EcoCalculator allows you to calculate a reduction from “average” in the embodied emissions of materials and on-site work, based on your choice of building assemblies. The EIO (economic input-output) LCA tool provides an economic-wide assessment of your construction activity. New building construction case studies will be presented in which these tools were used.

Participants will take away from this portion of the seminar:

• An introduction to calculating “carbon neutrality” and other GHG emissions goals for their new building projects;
• An introduction to RMI’s Green Footstep, the Athena Institute’s EcoCalculator, and CMU’s EIO LCA tool as tools that can be used together to this end; and
• An understanding of the pros and cons of the two major LCA methodologies – economic input-output and process-based – employed by these tools.

The U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Rating System (LEED®) requires energy modeling to assess the energy use of a building and to quantify the savings attributable to the proposed design. In many cases, architects and building owners are inexperienced with energy modeling and don’t know how to harness this powerful tool to inform the design and decision-making process. Properly used, energy modeling can help optimize the building design and allow the design team to prioritize investment in the energy-saving strategies that will have the greatest effect on the building’s energy use. This presentation seeks to put architects and facility owners and managers in a position to effectively direct the modeling process and evaluate the validity of the output presented.

The presentation will attempt to answer the following pertinent questions:

• Why model?

• When, in the design process, is the time to run the first model (orientation, daylighting, etc)?

• When, in the design process, is the time to run models again?

• How and when can the team provide feedback on the model

• What should be included in the model (a function of building type — from small student centers to million dollar laboratory buildings)?

• What is the benefit of the multi-stakeholder design process and energy modeling?